Bone Lord 4, стр. 50
On the ship next to mine, golden-armored Elyse was firing torrents of white Light from her warhammer. The intense heat of the magic beams blew holes through ships’ hulls, felled masts, and roasted dozens of sailors and soldiers at once. The leading enemy warship was close enough for me to see the Grand Commander’s face now. His dismayed expression turned into one of blind fury when he saw me. He rushed over to one of his ballistae, shoved the operator out of the way, and took aim at me with the weapon.
“Hand me a shield, Percy,” I said calmly.
Percy obliged, tossing me a tower shield. I caught it and enchanted it by redirecting souls I’d stored inside Grave Oath. The dull metal of the shield turned glossy and black with the power of Death just as the Grand Commander shot the ballista at me.
The old man’s aim was true, and the huge spear would have impaled me, if it hadn’t shattered into a shower of splinters when it struck the gleaming black shield.
“Nice try, asshole!” I yelled as I tossed the shield aside. “But now it’s my turn!”
I cocked my Tree wrist crossbow, quickly calculated the angle for the little projectile to hit him in the face, then loosed the bolt.
It was beyond any distance I’d ever made a shot with the tiny crossbow before, but my aim was perfect. The bolt arced up through the air, came down a few seconds later, and plugged the Grand Commander in the side of his neck. He staggered back and swatted futilely at the bolt in his neck, before he started coughing and writhing. Tree magic spread like a virus through his body, turning his skin to bark and his insides to living wood. Roots ripped through the soles of his feet and branches burst through his armor, and the piercing shrieks of his agony were music to my ears.
Now, the Church fleet’s desperation turned to fury, and they began a counterattack. The enemy ballista operators unleashed a shower of huge spears, the projectiles coming at us from all sides. They smashed holes into the hulls of my ships, and took out swathes of my zombies and skeletons on the decks. Luckily, none of my party members were hit, but a good number of my pirates and sailors were struck. One of my warships had also taken a bad hit to the hull, and it was floundering in the water, seawater surging in through the hole.
“We’re going to lose that ship, Captain Chauzec,” Percy yelled. “You gotta give the order to abandon ship!”
“No! Fang and a quarter of my undead army are on that ship, and I’m not just going to let them sink to the bottom of the ocean.”
“With a hole that size in the hull, Captain, you don’t have much choice,” Percy countered. “The sea will swallow that ship in less than two minutes, you gotta order the living crew on the ship to get into the dinghys.”
“That ship isn’t going to sink,” I said. “I’m plugging that hole.”
“You can’t just plug a hole that size, Captain. It’s the size of a wine barrel, and the force of the water coming through it is phenomenal! No man on earth is strong enough to stem that flow, and also, we don’t have nearly enough tar left, the Church ballista operators are reloading anyway, and—”
“I’m not going to be using tar,” I said. “There are other ways to plug a leak.”
One great thing about zombies’ bodies was that they were so much more flexible than living human bodies. Not in the sense that zombies somehow became more athletic, but rather that they didn’t feel pain, so you could rip tendons and muscles and break bones without consequence.
I started hurling zombie bodies against the hole in the hull, getting each zombie to sprint and throw himself against it to slow the raging torrent of seawater. The first few zombies were thrown back by the force of the water, but as more pressed in and shoved together, they began to overcome the intense force. They pushed the frontline zombies up against the hole and stemmed the flow of water. The bodies plugging the hole had their bones broken, flesh mashed, heads and limbs ripped off, but it didn’t matter—they were dead anyway. With enough flesh crammed against the hole, pressed into it by the power of almost a hundred zombies all shoving with all their might, the hole in the hull was plugged.
“You did it, Captain Chauzec!” Percy exclaimed. “I’d have bet every last gold piece I own that that ship would have been at the bottom of the ocean in less than five minutes, but you worked a bloody miracle, you did!”
Meanwhile, the Church of Light ballistae had almost been reloaded. More giant spears—and more holes to be plugged—was not something I wanted to deal with if it could be avoided.
A third of the Transcendent Sails Fleet was on fire, an acid rain hurricane was lashing another third, and the final third of the ships were either sinking, already sunk, or being smashed to splinters by my kraken. Far more soldiers and sailors had succumbed to my Plague Fog than not, and now the remaining ships were turning around and trying to flee, though a steadfast few men still manned the ballistae. I wasn’t about to let the enemy survive long enough to recover and regroup, though.
“Sink every last ship!” I yelled. “Don’t let any of them get away!”
Before the enemy could